Simplifying Fatigue Analysis

Fatigue analysis enables designers to estimate the fatigue life of new products, such as automobiles, airplanes, heavy equipment, electric motors and electronic components. Analysis provides data about fatigue life, crack propagation and strength, which you can use to make informed choices to ensure product integrity and optimize fatigue life — preventing premature product failure in the field.

You also can put fatigue analysis to work to determine why an existing product failed, enabling you to confidently redesign it.

Simplifying fatigue analysis.

In the past, fatigue theory was complicated and daunting, and mostly experts used fatigue analysis successfully. Modern simulation tools, such as ANSYS nCode DesignLife, make this critical job easier. They encapsulate a wide range of capabilities — methods for low-cycle and high-cycle fatigue and differing types of loading histories — that together provide a comprehensive fatigue analysis process.

You can capture the powerful analysis process in a workflow, which makes simulation easier since it requires less effort to set up and run problems. You can think of the workflows as a “wizard” that reduces the amount of data the user has to provide.

This technology tip demonstrates how to create a custom fatigue analysis workflow along with how to save it for future use together with the default workflows ANSYS Workbench already provides.

This FEA demo shows step by step how to create a fatigue analysis workflow, using a wind turbine model exposed to weather conditions for one year. Register to view the full demo by clicking on Simplifying Fatigue Analysis under Demos.